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Live@edu Integrates Exchange Labs

Microsoft's Live@edu, a suite of online tools focused specifically toward education, has now been expanded to include Exchange Labs, which is similar to a hosted Exchange service but with prototype features that are not yet available to the general public. The move brings expanded e-mail options to campus IT departments, including 10 GB of space per account, as free added features.

Live@edu is Microsoft's portal, communications, and collaboration suite for education that launched back in March 2005. It incorporates Office Live Workspace, a Web-based feature of Microsoft Office that allows for collaboration and sharing of documents. It also provides hosted personal storage and e-mail services. With the addition of Exchange Labs, Live@edu now offers two e-mail options: the 5 GB Hotmail-based accounts that were previously available plus the new Exchange Labs inbox, which is available for students, alumni, and others.

Microsoft told us that it's been quietly making the Exchange Labs service available to Live@edu users since December as a sort of semi-private, limited pilot and is only now committing to keeping Exchange Labs as an ongoing piece of technology available to Live@edu members. (Several thousand campuses around the world have signed up for Live@edu, according to Microsoft, but only a small percentage tested the Exchange Labs features through Live@edu during the quiet period between December and now.)

We spoke with Bruce Gabrielle, senior product manager for Microsoft Live@edu, who explained Exchange Labs and the reasons for rolling it into Live@edu.

"Exchange Labs is not hosted Exchange, but it's kind of like that. It's an R&D environment where we are testing new e-mail features for future versions of Exchange. And so basically we have our hosted Exchange 2007 environment, but we have additional features that are not available in Exchange 2007," he said. "We wanted to have customers to help us test these new features, and we found that universities were very willing and very excited to help us test these features and give them to their students. So Exchange Labs became a kind of quiet part of Live@edu. We didn't ... broadcast it widely because we didn't know if it was going to remain a part of Live@edu or if it was more like kind of a temporary addition to Live@edu. But we've had such fantastic feedback to offering free hosted Exchange--essentially hosted Exchange Labs--to students and alumni that we've now made a decision here at Microsoft to add it permanently to the Live@edu suite."

He continued: "The program is changing so much. If you haven't looked at Live@edu in the last six months, it's time to look again."

So how is this different from the Hotmail service also provided through Live@edu? In addition to the expanded e-mail storage (10 GB), it also provides:

Support for attachments up to 20 MB;

Access to e-mail, contacts, and calendar from Outlook and Outlook Web Access;

Support for Web-enabled mobile phones;

Message tracking (i.e., to determine whether a given message was delivered);

Content filtering (in addition to spam filtering);

Custom branding for the inbox with a school's logo and theme;

School e-mail addresses for graduates;

Global address lists;

Shared calendars; and

Support for the creation of distribution lists, with the ability to limit who can post to that list.

For those who prefer to use the Windows Live Hotmail service, that continues to be a part of Live@edu.

Anna Kinney, group product manager for Microsoft Live@edu, told us, "Students are coming to universities with more technology background and experience than ever before. And what I'm hearing from [campus] IT administrators I've talked to is that they are continuing to look for more and more ways they can meet students where they are with their level of sophistication--online services, virtual collaboration spaces, online storage--and Microsoft Live@edu brings that capability to campuses in a very quick and seamless way."

Although Live@edu's focus is on higher education, it's also available to K-12 schools.

In related news, Microsoft said it will be hosting Live@edu World, a conference for Live@edu members, at its Redmond campus June 23 trough 24. Further information about that event can be found here.

About the Author

David Nagel is edtorial director, education for 1105 Media's Public Sector Media Group. A 22-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art and business publications.